THE COMPLETE works of Primo Levi
Ok, so I was able impose on some friends to do some heavy lifting…see previous post. However I could not leave this dustbin of history without a few digressive remarks, putatively about words and literature and my current existential crisis.
The Noam Chomsky Collection (Haymarket Books)
But before I get to my own favorites of the past year, I want to give notice and recognition to The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Haymarket Books’s Chomsky Collection, Greg Grandin’s In the Shadow of Kissinger and Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans, edited by Paul Buhle. While I have long held that using the superlative ‘best’ as well as a number of other puerile superlatives (hottest, must read, coolest.most excellent), I have no problem assigning the rubric ‘important’ to a book. And the four titles mentioned above are prime examples of the tomes that must be considered important books among those that were published last year.
Primo Levi in the house of the maternal family( Luzzati family), photo by Giorgio Miserendino
Better minds and more rigorous writers (like James Wood) have exposited on Levi:
Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to simplify the writer into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer. Thus his account of life in Auschwitz, “If This Is a Man” (1947), whose title is deliberately tentative and tremulous, was rewrapped, by his American publisher, in the heartier, how-to-ish banner “Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.” That edition praises the text as “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit,” though Levi often emphasized how quickly and efficiently the camps could destroy the human spirit. Another survivor, the writer Jean Améry, mistaking comprehension for concession, disapprovingly called Levi “the pardoner,” though Levi repeatedly argued that he was interested in justice, not in indiscriminate forgiveness. A German official who had encountered Levi in the camp laboratory found in “If This Is a Man” an “overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man.” And when Levi committed suicide, on April 11, 1987, many seemed to feel that the writer had somehow reneged on his own heroism.
If only the lamentations of the left leaning and socially progressive spent more (some) time paying to the crystalline observations of Noam Chomsky.
From Red Rosa
Red Rosa by Kate Evans, edited by Paul Buhle
If I recall correctly German socialist thought dancing was as important as revolution. Kudos to Verso,Evans and Buhle for recognizing that attention must be paid…
In the Shadow of Kissinger by Greg Grandin
There has never been a time when so many publicly(indicted and) recognized war criminals have pranced around the United States with impunity. The most evil of these criminals is Henry (“Dr. Strangelove”)Kissinger. The late lamented Christopher Hitchens amused with his rhetorical flourish The Trial of Henry Kissinger:
His own lonely impunity is rank: it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims, known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand. (p. XI)
My 2001 conversation with Hitchens here yielded this
Robert Birnbaum: The Trial of Henry Kissinger originated with two serialized articles that appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Did your writing the pieces on Kissinger originate with you looking for a place to publish them or with Lewis Lapham [Harper’s editor] encouraging you to write them?
Christopher Hitchens: Well, I have been, for more than two decades, determined to write a book about Henry Kissinger, and I chose to start doing it properly last year…to collect all the material I already had, in one place and work it up. Because of the Pinochet trial and because of the Milosevic warrant, I thought that this changed the context. The first person to whom I mentioned this project was Lewis Lapham at Harper’s Magazine, who said, “Do it now. We’ll print it.” I barely had time to say, “Are you serious?” He said, “Get on with, too. It’s high time.” So, I knew I had a receptive editor, and I suspected I could probably expand it into a book as well. I wrote it for Harper’s, and then I updated it a bit, added a certain amount, and then it was published by Verso. I’m very much in Lewis Lapham’s debt because it’s the first time Harper’s has ever, he tells me, run two successive issues.
RB: Barbara Ehrenreich says when she had a discussion with Lapham about the article(s) that led to Nickel and Dimed, “an insane little smile” came across his face when the question of who would do them [came up] and he said, “You.” When you were having the conversation, did something like that happen?
CH: No, it was more like a peremptory gesture saying, “Why haven’t you done it already? Do it now, we’ll print it.” Then it was followed by a number of nudging calls to say, “Have you done it yet?” keeping me up to the mark. It’s nice to know that you have demand in that way. I’ll tell you something interesting. Neither he nor Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who jointly took the decision to put it two months running on the front page and promote it and so on, imagined that it would sell at all. They thought they ought to do it. They thought it was high time someone did do it. But they didn’t think of it as a commercial proposition. As it happens, the magazine almost sold out of the newsstands both times. Which is quite rare for a monthly.
Greg Grandin’s indictment of Herr Professor Kissinger has the force of rigorous attention to the documentary record (some of you will recognize this as what used to be called ‘history’)
From The People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger—Before His Death (catchy headline, no?)
Far from the calculating practitioner of Realpolitik that even his most ardent detractors tend to imagine, the Kissinger that emerges from Grandin’s book is compulsively drawn towards action for its own sake. Over the course of his career as national security advisor, secretary of state, and, later, elite global consultant, Kissinger “institutionalized a self-fulfilling logic of intervention” and established a working “template for how to justify tomorrow’s action while ignoring yesterday’s catastrophe.”
“At every single one of America’s postwar turning points,” writes Grandin, “moments of crisis when men of goodwill began to express doubts about American power, Kissinger broke in the opposite direction.” America almost invariably broke with him.
So here are my favorite real paper and ink books of the last 300 or so days…
House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke
House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke
Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane
Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
City on Fire: A novel by Garth Risk Hallberg
City on Fire: A novel by Garth Risk Hallberg
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella by David Gates
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella by David Gates
Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years by Thomas Mallon
Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years– by Thomas Mallon
The Lower Quarter: A Novel by Elise Blackwell
The Lower Quarter: A Novel by Elise Blackwell
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States
by Stephen Chambers
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States
by Stephen Chambers
Disposable Futures: Violence in the Age of the Spectacle HENRY GIROUX (Co-authored with Brad Evans).
Disposable Futures: Violence in the Age of the Spectacle HENRY GIROUX (Co-authored with Brad Evans).
Above the Water fall: A Novel by Ron Rash
Above the Water fall: A Novel by Ron Rash
A Free State: A Novel by Tom Piazza
A Free State: A Novel by Tom Piazza
American Meteor by Norman Lock
American Meteor by Norman Lock
The Cartel by Don WInslow
The Cartel: A novel by Don Winslow
Gutshot: Stories by Amelia Gray
Gutshot by Amelia Gray
The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel by Peter Swanson
The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel by Peter Swanson
The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price , Harry Brandt
The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price , Harry Brandt
The Small Backs of Children: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
The Small Backs of Children: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
A Spool of Blue Thread: A novel by Anne Tyler
A Spool of Blue Thread: A novel by Anne Tyler
The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr
The Lady from Zagreb (A Bernie Gunther Novel) by Philip Kerr
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
In the Shadow of Kissinger by Greg Grandin
Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin
Mislaid by Nell Zink
Mislaid by Nell Zink
*Of course this number has deep significance…
ourmaninboston 
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